Outbrain Best Practices

[Infographic] Which Ad Headlines and Images Catch Your Readers’ Attention?

Libi Rynkyu
Libi Rynkyu

This post was updated on January 2, 2021.

Every native ad has the same goal – to get the audience to engage and click through. It sounds simple, but achieving a good CTR is a challenge faced by performance marketers everywhere, every day.

As every performance marketer knows, past performance is the best predictor of future success. That’s why you spend so much time knee deep in performance data, trying to glean insights that can help optimize every aspect of your native ad campaigns – from headline length to image size, to audience targeting.

It’s one thing to analyze the data from your own ad campaigns – it’s quite another to have access to the performance data from a network that reaches 1 billion monthly users, worldwide.

Online ads have a very limited timespan in which to grab the reader’s attention. According to some studies, and much anecdotal evidence, the average attention span is getting shorter.

The exact amount of time an ad has to capture the reader’s attention is hotly debated – some say less than 8 seconds, other claims a measly 3 seconds, and 5-6 seconds is the reported attention span of the average millennial.

Any online ad has to work hard – and fast – to compete with all the other content on the webpage. Native ads have two main visual elements that can capture a reader’s attention: the headline and image. You definitely want and need, to make the most you can of every aspect of the headline and image – whether it’s the word length, image size, or how close up the image is.

And we want to help!

We’ve put our data to the test for you, comparing various combinations of headlines and images from across our network of premium publishers, to glean the very best practices that you can put to use in your own Amplify native ad campaigns.

So, dive in, grab some takeaways, and you too can capture the attention of your target audience to drive better results for your business.

Libi Rynkyu

Libi Rynkyu

Libi is Retention Manager in Outbrain's Growth Marketing team. She previously worked as Marketing Project Manager at John Bryce Hi-Tech Training School in Tel Aviv. Digital marketing and customer relationships are her battlefield. When not tackling marketing challenges, Libi loves British period drama TV, Stephen King books, and pizza.